In recent years the manufacture of dental restorations or prostheses by use of automated processes has increased. Ceramic materials are often used in such automated processes which also allow for making high-quality dental restorations because of their good physical, aesthetic and biological properties. The manufacture of such restorations typically includes:                capturing data representing the shape of a patient's teeth, for example by scanning a plaster model of the patient's teeth or alternatively by scanning the actual teeth in the patient's mouth;        designing the shape of a frame based on the captured data using software, such as computer-aided design (CAD) software; and        manufacturing the frame to correspond to the designed shape, for example, by an automated Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machine.        
An exemplary CNC machine for making dental restorations is available from 3M ESPE AG (Seefeld, Germany) under the trade designation LAVA™ Milling Unit.
Machines of this type are designed to automatically machine a dental restoration or parts of a dental restoration. To permit continuous use, some of these machines are equipped with an input buffer holding blank material that is automatically fed into the machine for sequentially producing multiple dental restorations without the need of intervention. Accordingly such machines typically also have an output buffer that receives finished dental restorations.
Automated handling of multiple dental restorations, however, requires the control of materials and the data related to the manufacture of the dental restorations, especially because dental restorations typically are unique and associated with a patient whose tooth or teeth are intended to be restored. For this reason, in a process of manufacturing reliable tracking of each individual dental restoration is required. Furthermore it is required to handle blank materials as well as the prepared dental restorations with sufficient care to avoid damages for example chipping or cracking.
Although the current approaches for handling of material blanks and dental restorations may provide a variety of advantages, there is still a desire for an automated manufacturing device and process that are relatively inexpensive and work reliably.